Introduction
No matter who we are, we all face the same big questions. This book is about two of the biggest: What about death? What about our ultimate destiny as human beings?
One way or another, all human beings must deal with these questions and all the other questions they bring with them, such as: What kind of being are we? Is there anything apart from life in this world? What is death and what follows, if anything? Who or what will decide our ultimate destiny? How, then, should we live?
These are unavoidable, all-important questions and yet it is very hard to come to grips with them. There seems to be no way of answering them with certainty and yet the way we answer them is bound to condition our whole lives.
What is the answer to death? What is our final destiny to be? Throughout human history, these questions have been put and answered in various ways and today there are many different approaches that claim our attention. Actually, however, there is more agreement than is sometimes supposed. For example, those who belong to the four largest world religions, Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity and Islam, as well as Jews and many other people, all agree that death is not the end. Adherents of the two largest religions, Christianity and Islam, also agree, along with many others, that there is a God, that there will be a resurrection of the dead and that there will be a final judgment. The Bible declares, “…it is appointed for mortals to die once, and after that the judgment…”[1] On the other hand, many people today either are agnostic about life after death, or flatly deny any such thing.
What is the truth? In any case, how can we know? This book springs from two convictions. The first is this. The Bible provides a truly reliable basis upon which to answer these questions. The second is this. The answers which the Bible gives have very often been ignored, or misunderstood, or misinterpreted, even in Christian tradition, often with disastrous consequences.
Why rely on the Bible, more than on other authorities or simply on personal opinion? The answer is, because the message of the Bible has proven to be uniquely trustworthy. Proven? Surely nothing about the afterlife or about final destiny has been proven! So people often assume. Yet central to the whole Bible is a unique figure, Jesus, and a unique claim, that Jesus has both died and been raised again to new, immortal life. That thereby Jesus has become the one who will determine the final destiny of everyone else. That Jesus, in fact, “died and lived again, so that he might be Lord of both the dead and the living.”[2]
The Bible presents a consistent message about human life, death and destiny, articulated in various ways over many centuries, with a claim to divine authority which convinces many millions of people. And the Bible also presents a person, Jesus, and an event, His death and resurrection, as the focal point and vindication of that message. Nowhere else can we find a resource with such credentials. The truth is here. Therefore, this book focuses on the Bible and what it has to say.
But surely we already know what the Bible says. Have not the Bible’s answers on human death and destiny been taught repeatedly, generation after generation, at least in the West, for the last 1900 years?
Certainly Christians of one church or another have addressed us on these matters repeatedly and some denominations, though certainly not all, have sanctioned one answer or another, all claiming the authority of the Bible. Yet, as a matter of fact, Christians have never been entirely in agreement on many issues. What is more, many doctrines maintained by this or that portion of the Christian Church have not been based directly or accurately on the Bible at all. As a result, today there is widespread ignorance, confusion or indifference as to what the Bible does teach and often its teachings are rejected even before they are heard.
There are two questions, in particular, to which even Christian tradition has repeatedly given answers totally inconsistent with the Bible, answers which rightly perplex or even scandalise many people today. First: What happens after death? The common traditional view is that at death the human soul or spirit, being immortal in nature, lives on, either in “heaven” or in “hell” or in some other “intermediate state”, pending the final judgment of God. Second: What will happen to those excluded from God’s final Kingdom? The standard Christian teaching has been that the “lost” are punished with everlasting suffering in “hell”.
Obviously both of these questions are extremely important for every one of us. Unfortunately the answers traditionally given by the Church have sown confusion and served to turn a great many people away from faith in God altogether. These answers have been derived from non-biblical sources, not from the Bible, and it is surely significant that, in fact, neither of the great traditional Christian creeds, the “Apostles’ Creed” and the “Nicene Creed”, makes any reference, either to the immortality of the human soul, or to a hell of eternal torment.
Soul-immortalism entered Christianity, not from the Bible, but from ancient Greek philosophy, profoundly influenced by Plato (c.428 – c.348 B.C.). Alan Richardson, former Dean of York, acknowledges this:
…the ancient Church inherited from Greek thought the notion of a soul substance which was by nature immortal, and this conception was often entwined with biblical teaching about resurrection. In the biblical view, a man dies and literally ceases to exist: his resurrection…was the result of an act of new creation by God.[3]
We owe Plato the greatest respect as a genuine and profound seeker after truth, but he would certainly not have wanted us to accept any of his conclusions uncritically. Yet this is what Christian tradition has done.
As for the question of the nature of final punishment, the eminent British philosopher Bertrand Russell has correctly observed:
It is sometimes supposed that Hell was a Christian invention, but this is a mistake. What Christianity did in this respect was only to systematise earlier popular beliefs.[4]
Today, more and more Bible scholars are finding the case against eternal torment convincing, or at least are calling for “fresh, radical and unbridled examination of the biblical data”.[5]
As far back as 1931, Archbishop William Temple called for such a re-examination. First, as to the Christian view of death, Temple asserted, in his Drew Lecture on Immortality:
The core of the doctrine (of the future life) is this: Man is not immortal by nature or of right; but there is offered to him resurrection from the dead and life eternal, if he will receive it from God and on God’s terms… It is a doctrine, not of Immortality, but of Resurrection… There is a very strong case for thinking out the whole subject again, in as complete independence as possible alike of medieval and of protestant traditions.[6]
Second, as to hell, Temple claimed, during another series of lectures to the University Church at Oxford (Christian Faith and Life, p.81):
If men had not imported the Greek and unbiblical notion of the natural indestructibility of the individual soul, and then read the New Testament with that already in their minds, they would have drawn from it a belief, not in everlasting torment, but in annihilation.[7]
I am a convinced Christian and a church pastor. It is not my purpose to detract in any way from Christian faith, nor to stigmatise the Christian Church. My purpose is to explore and explain what the Bible actually teaches on these matters, in order to advocate a truly biblical faith for today. The Bible is the one authority all Christians recognise and yet I am convinced that there is an urgent need for Christians today to recover and reclaim a truly biblical understanding of the human person, death and God’s ultimate purpose. I am also convinced that many people who reject or ignore Christian faith today have never been shown what the Bible itself actually teaches. Surely it is a matter of truly vital concern for everyone, Christian or not, to find reality regarding life, death and destiny.
So this book will set out systematically and straightforwardly what the Bible teaches about human death, eternal life and the final state of those whom God rejects. I am well aware that much may seem novel or even controversial, especially to readers nurtured on traditional doctrines of soul-immortalism and hell. However the views I shall be arguing for are not new, but have always been held by some and are held today by an increasing number.
I am after truth, not originality. Furthermore, the book would become much larger, more expensive and less readable, if I were to enter into a detailed discussion of every point of biblical interpretation! So, to make it clear that the explanations of biblical passages which I advance are not simply eccentricities of my own, and to help keep discussion within manageable limits, I shall quote frequently from internationally established scholars in the field.[8] However, I trust that in the end the Bible will speak clearly for itself.
This book argues the following. First, there is no immortal human soul or spirit. Rather, we all both live and die as whole body-and-soul beings. Our one and only hope of immortality is to be raised bodily from the dead, reconstituted as whole beings, at the coming of God’s final Kingdom, through Jesus Christ. Second, there will indeed be those whom God rejects at His final judgment and excludes from His Kingdom. However, they will not suffer forever, either physically or psychologically or spiritually, but will be finally and literally destroyed. In this book, the term “conditional immortality” will be used, as it quite often is, to refer to these two points. The entire matter is summed up in one memorable saying of the Apostle Paul, Romans 6:23:
For the wages of sin is death,
but the free gift of God is eternal life
in Christ Jesus our Lord.
4
[1] Hebrews 9:27: New Revised Standard Version (NRSV), New York: Collins, 1989. All quotations from the Bible are from this version, unless otherwise indicated.
[2] Romans 14:9
[3] “Soul”, in A. Richardson (Ed), A Dictionary of Christian Theology, London: SCM Press Ltd, 1976, p.316.
[4] B. Russell, History of Western Philosophy, London: Routledge, (1946) 1991, p.257.
[5] D. J. Powys, “The Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Debates about Hell and Universalism”, in Nigel M. de S. Cameron (Ed), Universalism and the Doctrine of Hell, Carlisle: Paternoster Press, 1992, p.135.
[6] Recalled in Eric Lewis, Christ, The First Fruits, Boston: Warren Press, 1949, pp15-16.
[7] Lewis, Christ, The First Fruits, pp.15-16.
[8] Not that all authors quoted in support of particular points would fully agree on everything in this book, of course!